Checksum Arcanius

“I don’t really trust the drivers on Windows Update.” Just moments after hearing from Dan these fateful words, I installed new audio drivers from windows update, and my laptop’s audio went away. I finally decided to fix it – it didn’t take too long, but it serves me right, not listening to the man who is Base 10 Computers. By the way, I highly reccomend his services if you have any sort of Windows related computer issues. He is the authoritative source of fixing all sorts of issues, from the perverse to the mundane.

Today, for the first time in a long time (I think over two months!), I rebooted sf2, the server behind silverfir.net. I figured it was time when I tried to restart apache and it gave me a long list of error messages. Nothing apparent was going wrong, but yes, even Linux succumbs to entropy, albeit at a seemingly much slower rate than Windows.

Work was pretty slow today, so I came home early and vacuumed out my truck, a task which was sorely overdue. After this, I went to eat with – and say goodbye to – Maneesh. He’s leaving for New York on Thursday and will be missed. Ben and Jon also came – we ate at Cuccina Cuccina in Issaquah. After this my brother and I went to an FHE titled “Spin The Bottle/Bare Buns Fun Run” that ended up being not nearly as racy as it sounded – we spun bottles to form groups who then “ran” bare fresh home-baked buns to various people in the church. A redeeming factor was that the girl my group delivered to was very nice on the eyes.

I suppose I should be happy that, as idnight approaches, I am getting tired. But there are so many good things I could be doing. But I guess thats why there’s tomorrow.

In other news, I talked for about two hours with Scott (GMS variety), which was cool cause I hadn’t talked to him in a long, long time. Thats all you get for now.

Apparently, 49,000 is greater than 64,000 – at least this is the conclusion that the program we made at the TRC hack session tonight came to – consistently. And yes, before you ask, everything was cast to unsigned ints. It was head-wrenching trying to figure out what wasn’t working properly, and after several hours of this, we finally gave up with the robot still either spending endlessly or not at all – and just had the robot move around more or less randomly. It was a fun end to a frustrating task.

After giving up on the robot for a while, we moved on to PHP and CSS and getting Paypal’s Payment Data Transfer working. If you want to see our progress on this, you should go ahead and donate some money to the TRC. Otherwise you can just trust me when I say that its not done yet. But pretty soon, it will be done, and it will rock, and then y’all best be donating ;-).

For the first time this week, I woke up before 8:00am – before 7:00am today, even. Hopefully this means I’m getting back on track in that department.

I’ve been having some good email discussions with Theo, who is deployed in the Stryker Brigade in Iraq. I will let you know more bout those later, when traffic isn’t getting worse at a steady pace.

Today, I woke up, and finished writing up a description of the two robots the TRC would be presenting today, went to work, talked to Austin about the TRC presentation, worked a little, ate lunch, talked to Austin again, worked a little more, got a call from the front desk telling me the TRC crew had arrived, picked them up with Larry and Dave, got them set up in the room, spent the next two hours watching and participating in the demo, helped break everything down, worked a little bit more, went home, held a hack session, and finally, played a few games to end the night.

Thew. TRC is life.

I just discovered that HTML tables are about 9 million times cooler than I had previously known.

In other news, I saw the Bourne Supremecy last night with Maneesh, Amy, and Donna, a friend of Amy’s. It was a well done action movie that veered ever futher from the book’s plot.

Political discussions before and after abounded, which was much fun, especially the “living wage” issue. I’m going to miss Maneesh a lot when he leave for New York. We’ll have to hang out a lot before then. As for now, its off to my house to host the TRC for final preperations for their Microvision presentation tomorrow.